My Ethos
The only attaboy most men ever get has a dollar sign in front of it.
This is the ground my work stands on. If you are trying to decide whether I am a man you could tell the truth to, reading this is how you find out.
What is actually wrong with men like you
Nothing. I believe that using the term “wrong with” is an inherently broken statement and, to be honest, a very lazy one.
There is nothing wrong with you.
Have you lost your way a bit? Maybe.
Has your behavior caused pain for yourself and others? Potentially.
Do you feel broken and beaten down by the world? Maybe. And if you do, you are not wrong to.
None of that means there is something wrong with you.
What you missed is that there was always a place to be witnessed in your shame, your feelings of brokenness, and your insecurities, and nobody ever showed you where it was. All of that had nowhere to go, so it found its way out in shadowy, and sometimes destructive, ways.
So you did what was available to you. You stuffed the shame, the confusion, the rejection, and the pain down, because there was no time for it and because carrying it where people could see it looked like weakness.
You learned to achieve over it, as proof it did not exist. The achievement became the evidence of your worth, your enoughness, and your ability to protect and provide.
Zeros, commas, a title on the door. So that is where we all go to get it.
Here is what nobody tells you. None of it builds the thing you actually need. The money does not do it. The exit does not do it. The company, the reputation, the record, the recognition: none of it gives you one inch more capacity to hold the experience of being a man in the modern world. Having the capacity to actually show up for yourself, to sit with your wife in her hard moments, to be there for a friend going through a hard time. To be with yourself in the mirror. To be with a hard decision that has no good answer in it and then hold the results.
Everything you have been looking away from while you built is not the obstacle to your freedom. It is the doorway to it.
On suffering
Suffering is meaningful and unavoidable. I am not going to pretend otherwise to make this easier to read.
I am not telling you to go chase it, to suffer more, or to build a personality out of how much you have endured. Plenty of men do that and they end up in the rubble of their own creation. What I am telling you is that when you let the suffering in, when you allow it to happen and you accept that it came to teach you something, it becomes the thing that makes you trustworthy. It makes you safe to be around. It makes you a man other people can turn to.
Inside the suffering is the roadmap to the reconstruction of your nucleus.
Walking through it is where capacity comes from.
On a man’s nucleus
Every man has a center. Not as a figure of speech: an actual center, low in the body, where your power sits, and a central channel running up through your root to your heart. In the traditions I trained in it is called the dan tien. In plain terms it is the place you operate from when you are not performing. It is where your presence, your truth, and your life energy live.
That center gets muddled. Stories, wounding, rejection, neglect, what was done to you and by you. Given enough years, the signal coming out of it is no longer yours.
A man is designed to be the nucleus of his world. I do not mean it in the my way or the highway, everything revolves around me sense. I do not mean controlling, manipulative, or a household that arranges itself around his mood. That is not a nucleus, that is an ego run wild. That is a man whose center is off, making everyone around him pay for it.
What I mean by the nucleus of his world is that he takes responsibility for the culture he creates. For how people feel in his presence. For how his wife experiences the world he built. He is the boundary. He is the container. He is the mountain.
When his nucleus is off, his world is off, and everyone in it can feel it, including the people who will never say so to his face.
When a man reconstructs from his nucleus, he becomes the man his world has been waiting on: the steady one, the one people set their bearing by, the one who grounds the room.
On capacity
Capacity is what happens when you stop looking away.
I have learned this time and time again in the jungle, the desert, in ceremony, building a business, and in my fourteen years post-addiction, and every one of them taught it the same way. When you stay in something instead of running from it, your edges move outward. You sit at the exact limit of what you can be with, you do not look away, and afterward the limit is further out than it was. You then have more capacity to move through the world with integrity, authenticity, leadership, and truth.
Most men live inside their edges like a prison and arrange their entire life so they never have to bump up against them. It is an ever-shrinking way of existing. When you move the edges, you get space. Space to move, space to breathe, and space to be with another person without your stories and ego showing up to steer the ship.
That is not resilience, it is capacity. Resilience is how well you take the hit and bounce back. Capacity is how much room you have before it lands, and how much of your life you can hold at once.
Building it is a practice, not a theory. The practice is capacity work. It is the basis and the whole of what I do.
What nature has taught me
Keep going.
When you are in the heat, keep going. When you are in the storm, walk into it the way the buffalo does, rather than try to outrun it. You can be with far more than you think you can. The thing you are walking through ends, and on the other side is the capacity you have always needed.
What ceremony taught me
The more I look away, the longer the process gets. The more I look away, the longer the pain stays. The more I look away, the further I get from my truth.
The more staying power I have, the more I choose to be with what is in front of me, the more I grow, the more I move, and the more present I become.
Full surrender on a river bank in Sedona
I was in ceremony on a river bank in Sedona, Arizona, in October 2020. I laid back on the sand, looked up, and the trees above me were behaving like human lungs. Branching the way lungs branch. Moving the way lungs move. That was when I understood that everything is connected and that I was not separate from any of it.
What I felt was relief, clarity, and a deep clearing of all the weight I had been holding onto so tightly. My relationship to my past and to the man I had been rewired itself on that sand.
A quiet voice said: “life will never be the same.” It was right. It never has been.
I am telling you this because it happened, because it is a large part of who I am, and because it is where my ability to sit with another man in his own abyss came from.
What I got wrong, for a long time
The same thing you are getting wrong.
I believed the achievement would fix it. The money, the accolades, the trophies from my tennis career, the commas and the zeros in my bank account. I thought that was the first priority. It was not. The first priority was getting my own inner wilderness in order, so that I could hold all of it and remain grounded, instead of being derailed by it.
When I finally understood that, I walked away from several business coaches and chose to go do the deep inner work instead. That was the most expensive decision I have ever made, and it is the only reason I can do what I do now.
My teachers
I did not build this alone and I am not going to pretend I did.
I have sat with and learned from Shipibo curanderos. Mexican elders. Leadership teachers and facilitators. I have spent years training my nervous system in rooms full of men. I have studied facilitation, nervous system work, linguistics, and bioenergetics under leaders in those fields.
What they gave me was bigger than technique. They gave me somewhere to be witnessed in my own shame and my own discomfort, and then they taught me how to hold another man there. How to hold myself there. How to sit with a man in the darkest of his darkness, in the hottest fire he has ever stood in, and not flinch and not leave. And then how to walk out the other side of it with him.
There is nothing another man can bring to me that I will shudder from.
The hardest part of this work, which I have not said publicly before
The capacity does not come until it comes. Honestly, until you are ready to see it and to live it.
There is usually a lag. You can do the breath work and the nervous system work daily for weeks and feel like nothing is moving. Then it arrives all at once, in a moment you did not schedule. Your wife comes to you, and you realize you have everything you need to be there with her, and you lock in. You are in the middle of a big negotiation and you realize you are staying centered and clear where you used to go chaotic and get overwhelmed.
That is what the work actually buys. Not a feeling. The capacity to be there when it counts.
What I want for you
I want you to be able to look back in ten years and say three things.
I did not waste a single breath.
I did not miss a moment I was meant to experience.
I was there for the people who needed me.
If you would rather see how the work itself runs: my work.